Children in The Danger Zone

Researchers have worked for years to figure out why it is so dangerous to be born black in America; two new medical studies reveal the extent of the devastation. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Kenneth Schoendorf, a medical epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics, reported that black babies suffered twice the mortality rate of white infants even when both parents had completed college. Based on U.S. birth and infant death certificates that were filed from 1983 to 1985, a determination was made by Schoendorf and his colleagues that the gap was due entirely to the fact that more black infants were underweight at birth.

Although more black women than white women in the study received late or no prenatal care, that discrepancy alone was not great enough to account completely for the twofold gap in mortality rates. Schoendorf points to several possible reasons. Among them: the cumulative effects of a lifetime of inadequate access to health care, and the chronic stress associated with being black in America. One piece of good news in the report: black and white infants of normal birth weight enjoyed identical chances for good health.

The other study, from the Journal of the American Medical Association, documented skyrocketing violence in the inner city. Dr. Leland Ropp and his colleagues in Detroit found that the overall rate of childhood death for all races in their city had risen 50% from 1980 to 1988. Tragically, almost the entire increase was linked to a jump of 250% in the rate of murder, usually by handguns, of black boys ages 10 to 14 and of black teenagers of both sexes, ages 15 to 18.

Preliminary figures show that the epidemic of murder -- fueled by access to cheap, powerful weapons -- spread to other large cities in 1989 and began moving to smaller cities this year. Says Ropp: "We're beginning to see children's homicides and gunshot wounds in places like Minneapolis and Pittsburgh, where we've never seen them before."